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Supernormal faculties in Man- Dr Eugene Osty

Since 1910 I have followed out an experiment which has already become a bulky record. This experiment consists in giving the course of my own life for anticipatory cognition to an increasing number of metagnomic subjects, and more particularly to some who have proved the best endowed with precognition in relation to myself.

To those researchers who desire to assure themselves that the truly distressing phenomenon of precognition of the future is a reality, I recommend this means of conviction. It will satisfy them more effectively than reading about facts necessarily associated with the uncertainties of human testimony, and will be much more profitable than the philosophical speculations long since canalised in opinions, doctrines, and words.

Nothing escapes observation from this standpoint, everything is instructive; and experiment delivers its whole content.

Each subject at each seance is placed in a position to draw up the balance-sheet up to that date and to follow out the ulterior development of the life cognized. His words are fixed on paper. With reference to the revelations of the percipient, the experimenter notes the contents of his own thought, what he knows, and what (strictly speaking) he might subconsciously know. His ensuing life gives impartial judgment, discriminates the shades of exactitude, what approximates to fact, what is omitted, and what is erroneous; also the diverse aspects of the errors and their origins.

 Thus one may advance through Time comparing the transformations in the content of thought with the consecutive evolution of metagnomic information.

The view of a psychic life so given, its marvellous complexity and. unexpected significance, inspires one with energy to persevere in an enterprise full of difficulties, fertile in mistakes, and in emotions that are sometimes painful. I intend to carry on this experimental research on precognition of the course of an individual life to the twentieth year and then to use it for a monograph.

At present I shall draw from it only some reflections regarding the influence of the personality cognized on the elaboration of paranormal information concerning him.

 Those who have collected facts of prediction on a human life without having themselves called it forth for purposes of study ; those who from mere curiosity have once or several times enquired concerning their own future from metagnomic percipients ; those who have approached the problem by reading only; all these believe precognition to be unalterable, like an unchangeable memory.

They attribute fixity to the events that diversify individual lives, and confer on metagnomic subjects the power of perceiving ideal images which the future will bring into reality.

Now this belief in the fixity of precognition is born of speculative dreams on premonitions of fact for which only authentication by testimony has been sought, and this belief-built up in complete absence of methodical investigation-is false.

When an experimenter places himself as an impartial and attentive observer, taking a share by incessant experimentation in the metagnomic output, he speedily perceives that foreknowledge is variable knowledge, constantly and progressively elaborated ; that like life, it is evolutionary and living; as if the transcendental mode of thought of each man, aware of the general direction and outstanding events of existence, were progressively informed of the events circumstantial to its foreknowledge as the human personality takes its way through the current of surrounding lives.

 A first group of experiments enables us to observe that that precognition of the evolutionary states of a life is variable according to the moment in that life when a metagnomic percipient is invoked.

The records of seances for premonitory metagnomy on a human objective, though varying as to their narrative content, resemble one another in the perspective taken by the quality of supernormal cognition, for according as it refers to states of life more or less distant in the future, that cognition differs in penetration and extent.

Dealing with emotional modifications, new directions, new intellectual activity, organic perturbations, and events, it shows itself best able to produce circumstantial and co-ordinated information when touching on states of life then in actual course of realization, that is, already become partly actual and known, although often unforeseeable as to their issue. That which is known, however slightly, is of powerful assistance to fuller precognition of the future, quite independently of any rational suppositions by the person affected.

The precognition becomes less full and abundant in detail, less able to co-ordinate conditions in a life when those conditions are near but quite unexpected, or are slightly more distant in time and unconnected with any causes as yet in operation.

And in proportion as precognition endeavours to disclose more distant aspects in a life, its imperfection becomes more marked.

Starting from a few years ahead, only the general trend of a life is revealed and only a few salient episodes are given.